Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersedaudiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. Butbecause they are used differently than print—scientistsand scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinksrather than browse or peruse—electronically availablejournals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a databaseof 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), andonline availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journalissues came online, the articles referenced tended to be morerecent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more ofthose citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forcedbrowsing of print archives may have stretched scientists andscholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship.Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinksquickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, butthis may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findingsand ideas built upon.

“This research ironically intimates that one of the chief values of print library research is poor
indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles
and authors, primarily within core journals—
likely had unintended consequences that assisted
the integration of science and scholarship.
By drawing researchers through unrelated articles,
print browsing and perusal may have facilitated
broader comparisons and led researchers
into the past. Modern graduate education parallels
this shift in publication—shorter in years, more
specialized in scope, culminating less frequently
in a true dissertation than an album of articles [...]“